Blog of the Lincoln High School's Urban Planning Class

The survey group spent the week trying to figure out some questions for the survey- we started out brainstorming some general questions that we can ask everyone (teachers, students, parents, and the general public). Some of these questions we weren’t sure how to format, like if we wanted to use a scale or to format the question as a yes or no answer. Quinn’s working on getting these questions put up on survey monkey too…. So here’s the rough draft of our survey.

1. Would you be more inclined to use the Lincoln facilities on a regular basis if they were more readily available?
2. If Lincoln had a health clinic, would you use it? Would it be more convenient than going to your current health clinic?
3. Would you be more inclined to drive if Lincoln had a parking structure?
4. In your opinion, should Lincoln be a school- only site, or should it incorporate businesses on campus?
5. Do you consider the current Lincoln facility a community center for the surrounding neighborhood?
A. Yes- Very much
B. Yes- somewhat
C. No- not very much
D. No- not at all
6. What would you personally like to see on a new Lincoln campus? (check all that apply)
Public Pool
Daycare
Public Library
Health Clinic
Night Classes
Parking
More green space/ courtyards
Residential
Public fitness facility
Rooftop garden
Partnerships with businesses

7. What do you consider to be the biggest problem with the current Lincoln building?
8. Do you think that partnerships with Lincoln, PSU, and OHSU would be beneficial?
9. Demographics-
Age
Gender
Grade
Zip Code
Do you have any children?
10. How do you get to and from school?
Bus
MAX
Walk
Bike
Drive yourself
Carpool
Parent Driven
Other

If you guys have any suggestions for the survey that’d be great, but for now that’s the general outline of our survey.

On the week of Feb. 22nd our urban planning class went through some
minor changes in terms of curriculum and structure. This was the
focus of Monday. We received a plan from our instructor, Mr.
Zaninovich, for the week. The plan detailed four assignments that
needed to be completed by the end of the week, thus creating the type
of focus that we felt the class had been needing.
The class was split into four groups on Tuesday. The groups are as
follows:
Work Plan: Taylor, Will and Maria
Surveys: Max, Emma, Andrea, Quin and Shahin
Interviews: Aaron, Mckenzie, Aiden
Case Studies: Louis, Evelyn and Dina
(Think I got everyone)
Work began on creating questions for the survey team to ask. We also
began to plan how we would complete our tasks within the week.
Wednesday was focussed on the case studies group. The first order of
business was to create questions fro the group to ask Sy Adler. After
those questions were made the case studies group left for PSU to
interview Mr. Adler. The rest of the groups began work on their
assigned tasks. That filled the rest of the day.
Friday’s class was a review of the week. The case studies group
briefly explained what they had learned from Mr. Adler about the PSU
Urban Center. The groups then split up and continued work on their
tasks.
This week was very productive and was the first week using the new
class structure. It will be interesting to see how the structure of
the class evolves from what have learned this week.

Brainstorming, our class came up with things that we want to know more about, that we can potentially add to our 21st century school. We want our school to be the center of the community, so in order to achieve that we want many spaces that are open to the public, such as a library and health clinic. We divided these things into: open to the public, and Lincoln use only. This includes spaces like a rooftop garden and new science labs.
Next, we came up with ways that we can learn more about the things that we want. Three strategies we decided were going to be our main sources of information were surveys, interviews and case studies. Among each category, we listed who we wanted to survey and interview; this way we have a clear plan of who we are going to interview/survey and why. This will help us see what the public wants in their community high school.

– Tayler W.
In order to successfully add these different aspects to our new school, we needed to research different plans to see what did, or did not work. One of the plans that we examined was titled “A Plan for 21st Century Schools” and was written by the Long Term Development Committee (LTDC) for the Lincoln site. For homework, we were assigned to read the plan and take notes on what we considered positive throughout it. When we returned to class, few of us had completed the reading assignment so we decided to separate into groups as a way to look at specific aspects of it. After looking deeper into the plan the group decided that, although over a year old, the plan had many similarities to the one that we are in the process of writing and that as we continue writing our plan we need to keep the LTDC plan in mind in order to not recreate the wheel.
Also this week, we discussed where this class is going and if, as students, we feel like we are getting enough out of the class. We discussed certain aspects of student behaviors that seemed to be halting the class’s progression. Some of these behaviors included tardiness, not being prepared, and absentee rates. Teacher-student communication was brought up and as a class (teachers included) we devised different actions that would help further communication, such as more specific emails and more homework assignment.

We’re starting to outline what it is exactly we’d like to see in a new Lincoln site. We’ve broken it into four sectors: LHS site, LHS building, Goose Hollow and PPS. From these sectors, or bubbles as seen on the Web net, other components were drawn, for example: For Goose Hollow we branched integrated community and PSU with. We were overwhelmed by the outline, and turned to Principal Peyton Chapman to help direct us on some focuses a state-of-the-art Lincoln High School should have:

“I’d love to see a model of public-public partnerships in one redeveloped community center (center of community) site. Adults draw towers for condos and retail. What would it look like to have a child care center, community gym, community court house, community library, arts center, retirement place (safe indoor track and pool with a “heart” wellness clinic in addition to the school nurses office? Health clinic for everything from immunizations to birth control to cancer screens? A recycling center for the community for cans, paper, food? Library with pre-school books to law library materials? What could Portland Parks and Rec use? (Indoor tennis, pool, soccer, dance studio?) What could the county health agency use? What could Portland State use? (Classrooms for School of Education?) How about a mini Children’s museum or art gallery? Community gardens? Coffee shops and music practice rooms?

Dream! It has to be more “beautiful” than condos and retail.”

From this we decided to focus on integrating the community with Lincoln–And humored the possibilities of adding a Health Clinic and a Daycare to the new school. Both aspects are not new to PPS.

Health Clinic:

Grant High School currently runs a health clinic that seems to be going relatively well. Their health clinic is partnered with Planned Parenthood, and is open to the public–But we are unsure whether we would model after this. Planned Parenthood is associated with negative connotation because of the issue of “abstinence or safe sex?” teaching, and opening the health clinic to the public may be opening the high school’s door to too much of the public. The advantages of a Health Clinic is that it will provide easy accessibility to healthcare for the community. The disadvantage being that more students may feel safer to have sex because they would have easy access to contraceptives. A few questions we still need to ask ourselves are,

Should it be private or public?

Should a Health Clinic focus more on immunization, or planned parenthood?

What is Lincoln’s Socio-Economic Status? (Would a Health Clinic be wanted?)

The other program being discusses is DayCare.

Daycare:

Woodrow Wilson High School is currently operating a Preschool which is taught by High School students taking a Child psychology course. While we were not necessarily steering in the direction of a Preshcool, we are interested in entertaining the idea of having a Daycare. Many teachers have young children–too young for preschool–that they have to drop off in a daycare before coming to work. This is often inconvinient for them because their daycare is usually located far form Lincoln, and thus elongates their trip to school. Nonetheless, the Goose Hollow inhabitents tend to be younger, which means they usually have young children as well. A daycare may be appropriate for the community, and could also simultaneously, like Wilson, teach students life skills. The pros of a Daycare, as previously expressed, is that it would be convinient for teachers and the community alike. The cons–Is that students may feel more confortable bearing a child while still enrolled in High School knowing that their child will be taken care of while they go to the school in the day. A few questions we are asking about a Daycare at Lincoln are,

How much will it cost? How much does it cost per child/Will we charge for services?

How many people would actually use the Daycare?

Then the question of, “What would a new Lincoln building actually look like?” to answer this we found out the size of the entire Lincoln Site (477,417.6 square feet) and the size of the Lincoln Building, including the multiple stories, (300,000 square feet). We then talked about PSU’s new site, in which college-friendly businesses comprise bottom levels. A courtyard seperates the glass university buildings fro each other, which also provides a place for the students to hangout in. We might end up modeling a new Lincoln High School after this PSU site. One thing is for sure: We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and as Ms. Chapman said, it sure has to be better-looking than some condo-home, retails–And for sure, the current site.

Hello, I would like to be the first to say welcome to the new way of
communication, in the 21st Century, in this world of text messaging, twitter and facebook . I now have the pleasure of introducing the next in the
chain of communications from behind the keyboard, The Blog. This is our way of keeping you up-to-date with the progress of our class and what we are doing and learning in class. Most blogs may seem egotistical, but we’ll try and stay away from that. We are just high school students here, we aren’t that amazing but we do like to think that we are.

I am one of the 13 students in Lincoln High School’s first Urban
Planning Class taught by George ‘last-name-none-of-us-can-pronounce’
Zaninovich and Bart Millar (much easier on the tongue muscles and
brain). We began this year with discussions, lectures, readings and
videos about the different bureaus that makes Portland ‘the city that
works’ . We touched on the urban growth boundary, mixed use districts like the Pearl, community involvement, public spaces like parks and 23rd ave,transportation and other essentials to our city. We ended this with a
mini project of creating a small district that had set up zones, high
density housing, mixed use and commercial with overlays of
transportation, social services, and parks. This changed into our
project that we ended our first semester with, the district plan of
the Brooklyn Rail Yard. For this project we used the topography of the Brooklyn Rail Yard in Portland, but ignored any existing buildings. Then we placed the following zones: housing, commercial and mixed use, we
were then broken up into 6 different bureaus that would work together
to plan the district.

Transportation (Aaron and McKenzie).

Economic Development (Aiden and Max).

Social Services (Dina and Emma).

Housing (Evelyn and Tayler).

Parks and Environment (Louis and Will).

And Citizen Involvement (Andrea and Quin).

Together we layed in the structure of our district with schools,
public transportation, business areas parks, a library, a
state-of-the-art homeless shelter, a plaza, its own version of the water-front park we all loved a pedestrain only street full of shoping and restaurants. This was our project to work together to create a livable
district that could safely, equitably, provide accessibility and
service to the whole district community.

This is easier said, well read, actually in this case its easier typed
than done. We all had very different ideas between the 12 of us
students and George ‘last-name-that-is-harder-to-say-than-Sea-Anemone’
Zaninovich. Us being the group of Lincoln students, who are
stereotypes as rich kids that think way to highly of themselves, but
all in all we are humans brought up in a democratic republic with one

of our rights being freedom of speech, it is in our nature to argue

anything that isn’t our idea because we can, and our way is the only
right way. Of course this may have been influenced a bit by the fact
that in our class has two of our Speech and Debate Teams top junior
scorers, residing in it. Needless to say, even though I’m still going
to typing it, finalizing any part took a long time and was sometimes
revisited, reargued over the same topics, changed, moved, changed
back, erased and argued over again, all because we didn’t know if the
street car should turn at one street corner or go an extra block then
turn. As silly as that may sound it is a very important part of our
design process it was a question of should the street car go through
mixed housing or inbetween mixed use and the water front park. We
decided inbetween the park and mixed use, easier to get to the park
and doesn’t disrupt the housing in mixed use but still allows for
businesses to be accessible. We finished the District Plan which was
then put into photoshop and changed into a cleaner version, of the
previous rough laminated version that was taped together. This version
was presented to Rex Burkholder (who is running for Metro President),
he took time out of his campaigning schedule to come in and listen to
a bunch of high school student as we presented our district and why we
designed it how we did. He listened commented asked questions and
provided critique and constructive critisism when and where it
applied. This was how our first semester was spent learning the basics
from George ‘last-name-that-we-mumble-through-so-he-doesn’t-notice-how-bad-we-are-at-saying-it’
Zaninovich and applying them to a project and presenting it as if it
was part of a city plan that was going to be built. Now we face our
next challenge the school redesign and the installation of 21st
century schools in the Portland Public Schools.

thank you peyton for attending, and thank you to louis and aaron for bringing addtional guests.

thank you mr. burkholder and mr. farkas for your time and advice.

interesting fact: rex burkholder knew the building because he was, on occasion, a substitute teacher here in the past.

some notes i made, based on questions and feedback from our guests:

presentation:
be on time
dress better
hand out the handouts
consider someone giving time signals if we are limited in our speaking time

housing:
below grade parking=60k per spot
consider preserving any older buildings/neighborhood character
environmental considerations
families do live in HD housing, but generally not in pdx
25 to 50 percent of low income people have no access to autos
mixed use decreases crime, increases viability, people of different economic classes mix with each other

social services:
good work on HHH
hospital and comm college=jobs
make ground level as interactive as possible
find out about tax credits
what regulations/regulatory bodies do we need to consider?
can we provide incentives for builder to build or people to live here

parks:
consider pedestrian street to the library/central plaze

transportation:
pdx rules state 2 parking spots per 1K feet of commercial space
use 2 way streets in dense commercial because 1 way moves traffic too fast
speed limit in pdx is 25 mph, effective speed is 13 mph
the split N-S max line increases commercial development, which is good
bikes?
parking?

econ development
anchor tenant? multiblock campus for anchor tenant?

neighborhoods/ovesight
nice work on 3 block transportation access, safety, pedestrian walkway) (these are desired outcomes that were incorporated at the start rather than retrofitted)
good work considering outcomes, accessibility, safety, equity
remember streets are for people, not cars
look at bogota–philosophy is that public social spaces create equality–(this is characterized elsewhere in central park in nyc, multnomah county library, etc.)

facts from peyton and abe farkas

only 20 percent of voters have school-age children
mixed age should be considered in closer proximity (daycare——>school—–>work——->retirement home–all in the same spot)
(you could be a cardinal from cradle to grave)
(we could offer prenatal care and a cemetery if we really wanted to expand this idea)
areas to be developed work better, sdooner, if people move in before business